This invention relates to glass manufacturing, and more particularly to improved apparatus for handling or disposing of pieces of hot glass or cullet, which are rejected during the manufacture of glass articles, for example during the manufacture of glass bottles.
By its very nature a glass furnace is designed for continuous operation. During the production of glass bottles, for example, a supply of molten glass is fed from a melting chamber in a furnace to a refiner/riser section, and then to forehearths from where it is dispensed to various stations of an adjacent bottle forming machine. During this dispensing operation molten glass flows in the form of a gob from the orifice of each of several adjacent forehearths, each gob being severed by a pair of adjacent shears and conveyed by an indexing arm to a given station on the bottle forming machine. However, if for some reason the machine is not in a position at that moment to accept the gob, the indexing arm does not pass beneath the orifice, so that the severed gob is allowed instead to drop directly into the upper end of a gob drop chute, the lower end of which extends beneath the floor to overlie some form of cullet handling or disposal apparatus.
In the case of one such conventional apparatus the rejected gobs drop out of the lower ends of the chutes in a semi-molten state into one or more so-called Roura Hoppers, where they tend to congeal or mold together to form a single, large gob. Periodically each Hopper is conveyed out of the factory by a fork truck, or the like, and dumped into a cullet yard, where the cullet are left to cool.
Instead of simply allowing the gobs to drop into a Roura Hopper, it has also been customary to employ a more automated system in the form of a vibratory trough, which is positioned generally horizontally beneath the discharge ends of the gob drop chutes. The trough, which contains water for cooling the gobs as they drop into the conveyor, is subjected to intense vibrations which tend to cause the gobs therein to bounce or shift longitudinally down the length of the trough and off one end thereof onto the moving surface of a conveyor.
One disadvantage of this vibratory-type trough is that its framework must be supported directly on the floor beneath the discharge ends of the gob drop chutes so that the trough itself can be subjected to the intense vibrations necessary to impart motion to the cullet or gobs. Moreover, while it is usually designed to cool the individual gobs sufficiently to prevent any undesirable molding thereof one to another, it nevertheless is not possible to produce a predetermined quench time for all of the gobs which are fed to the trough, because the gobs last to fall into the trough are those which are discharged from the drop chutes closest to the discharge end of the trough. As a consequence, at the moment they are discharged from the trough onto the conveyor, they will be substantially hotter than those gobs which enter the trough at or adjacent the end thereof remote from its discharge end. Furthermore, this type of installation is an extremely noisy and expensive installation, and makes extremely inefficient use of the cooling water, which upon overflow is allowed simply to drain away as waste water.
It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide improved apparatus for handling the waste glass or hot cullet produced by glass fabricating machines of the type described. More particularly, it is an object to provide apparatus of the type described which is easy to install, and which permits uniform quenching time of hot cullet.
Another object of this invention is to provide an improved cullet disposal method and associated apparatus therefor which is substantially more versatile and efficient than conventional systems of the type employing vibratory troughs.
Still other objects of the invention will be apparent hereinafter from the specification and from the recital of the appended claims, particularly when read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.